Shahid Online - Tech Corner

Ever since Sun MicroSystems released the code to StarOffice, it kicked up a storm in the open source world and we saw the birth of OpenOffice (OOo). It is not about being open source, but this broke down the barriers of sharing documents and collaboration. Microsoft upped the ante with the recognition of collaboration for business and release a free service - Microsoft Office Live Workspace - which is currently in Beta. However, open source has given us a reason to shun the offerings from Microsoft and seek alternatives. In this article I intend on presenting this to you. Office Alternatives First off, what are the alternatives to Microsoft Office? The first choice is (obviously) OpenOffice (OOo). This application is a complete office suite to compete with Microsoft Office: Microsoft Word = OpenOffice Writer Microsoft Excel = OpenOffice Calc Microsoft Access = OpenOffice Base Microsoft PowerPoint = OpenOffice Impress Microsoft Visio = OpenOffice Draw (kind of, but is a welcome a...

A while back, Google announced its acquisition of Zenter, an online slide presentation firm. So basically, Google can now expand on their arsenal of online office applications - Google Docs & Spreadsheets. They may as well call the suite Google Office, now that they can take on Microsoft Office. Especially when this is to be combined with Google's previous acquisition of Tonic Systems, which also produces presentation software. This new challenge to PowerPoint from Google is expected to be available sometime this summer.